Dandelion
by xxbeyondxbirthdayxx
Summary: Be happy with what you have... nice, but Mihael... what do I have? MATT POV


_**Note:** It started with the first sentence and I wrote it straight, with no real structure, I don't know where it was leading, so it's just a quick oneshot._

* * *

><p>Be happy with what you have... nice, but Mihael... what do I have?<p>

The ritual answer to my daily lament, as I watch by the window, opening it when you begin to complain about my first smoke of the morning, and the sight of traffic, pollution, crowd, and this dirty place we're living in, out, it's the same after all, grey walls, grey concrete, our once-white-now-yellow tiles and the parking lot equally covered in scattered detritus, the smell of old food containers that need to be thrown in the garbage, the heavy foggy air of the factory in the distance, easily covering my cancer-laced addiction, and you shouldn't complain, my mind tells me, because you're probably breathing an air that's more or less as bad for your health than my cigarette smoke, and I utter it with this odd resonance in the apartment to which I never get used to, because it tells me how empty it is, how much we lack furniture, therefore how few money we have...

Hell, we even sold my last gaming device last week to be able to eat. You even gave up on chocolate. It kills me. My fingers itch, and as I crush this last cigarette that a homeless gave me yesterday, that I saved until I couldn't wait anymore, because it's probably the last one I'll ever smoke at this rate, on the windowsill, uncaring for the wood, for what we still can see of it, after all...  
>My fingers twitch, and I look around, and there's nothing I can play with, nothing plastic, nothing electronic. My eyes set on you, laid on the mattress, no bed, on the floor, with the filling poking out at places, strategically where your body applies pressure to the old material. And they itch more of comforting you than for the lack of game in my hands. You gave up on chocolate long before we had to sell my games...<p>

Your eyes meet mines and I realise I've been staring. You begin to mouth a 'what?', annoyed, but I shake my head. Nothing. Nothing, but your eyes soften at your sudden fit of annoyance, and a dimple appears as you try to to prevent your growing smile. When did you really smile for the last time?  
>I longingly look at the windowsill, desperate for another smoke to the point that I could pick up an old butt and light it, but they're all crushed to dust and smoked to the filter.<p>

My sight catches a glimpse of yellow, and I bend over the windowsill so I can see better. It's not a piss yellow like in the hall of the building, nor the one of the stained tiles or the cigarette smoke tainted mattress. A dandelion. There, in a little crack of the cement, on the outside border of the window. It grows head down, but the flower defies gravity to tend to the light.

And I remember, that actually, you've never smiled as much as you do since we are here. Gone, Kira, gone, our victory, for we left all credit to Near, eager to disappear to the knowledge of the world for the detectives we were, for the nicknames we sported since a task was forced on us as kids, for the insane remains of us. Because, also gone is the competition in your mind, the battle you fought, the craziness in your dark-circled eyes...  
>Leaving you bare, as are my goggleless eyes. Just leaving our true selves, and where I thought that you'd disappear, my skills, the ones you dragged me along for not required anymore, you rewarded me with the unexpected erasure of the lies you had built as your shell, and you've been shielded for so many years that I didn't even know you could actually feel.<p>

The surprise when I discovered that, me, I had prevented myself to feel for so many years as well, left me raw, the day Near harvested the conclusions of our work, and that I, bleeding from bullet wounds, and you, half burnt, kissed in that same crappy place where we found refuge, along with, and that was the least Near could do, supplies to heal our wounds, and later, a few docs when our cases complicated.  
>I didn't care for the taste of blood and ashes and the awful smell of charred skin and melting leather, neither did you care for my already soaked bandages tainting your bare torso with bloody trails when we fell in each other's arms, the first touch in fifteen years, if you don't count the punches and shoves of hyperactive teenagers, at a time when we didn't have time.<p>

No time for us. That's how it was, and we thought that it was how it would always be, because we didn't know how to live. We were supplied everything and anything. Damn, we even were given things a child shouldn't ask, or even know. But have we really been children once? I doubt, because even when I picture you as the child you were when you arrived at the orphanage, at four years old, your mind, your eyes, your pain... they all were adult. And me? Well, I don't remember. I guess I'd rather forget so my mind won't let me get the souvenirs back.

Feeling. It scared both of us. Not for the fact we were both guys, not for the 'gay' label, not for the butterflies in our gut... Those were informations and facts we could process and analyze.  
>How stupid as it seems, we didn't know how to handle the situation, both suddenly eager for forever, and caught in a world of losses and disappointments. We had lost parents, innocence, L, faith in justice and human race, we probably even lost faith in ourselves at some point... and then we wanted a promise that none of us could give, because what each other craved was something the other did not believe in: happiness.<p>

We're still lost somewhere in our desillusions today, and when I wake up, and that my first words are, even after a night of love with you on the old mattress, 'Look at us, we have nothing...' when I look around and find no food, no cigarettes, no chocolate, no games, not even a chair... you always tell me to be happy with what I have.

But what do I have, Mihael?  
>I still stare at the dandelion, and a smile suddenly creeps on my face as I understand, after days of hearing you say this.<br>If a tiny flower can find the light it needs to grow in such a tortuous way that it has to twist its stem unnaturally, then I can find my own light in my own way.  
>Where I expected happiness in conventional ways, undergoing things, you were just waiting for me to join you at the point you had already reached.<p>

There is no other way to be happy than the one you choose.


End file.
